


Terrible Things Happen, and Then You Die

by Gray_Days



Category: Homestuck
Genre: A Series of Vignettes, Gen, Gore, Hazing, Sexual Harassment, Speculative Anatomy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-05 13:06:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18366623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/pseuds/Gray_Days
Summary: The author assures you it can always get worse.





	1. Good clean fun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You hurt the things you love.
> 
> …Well, I do, anyway. This is not a place of honour; there's little room for love or peace here.

They get the jump on him when he's turning past another clock-riddled parlor, too far from his room for anyone who's not looking for him to expect to find him. He gets his teeth into Fin's hand before Trace grabs his arms, and then they're pulling his doll away and trying to wrestle his clothes off while he screams every incoherent calumny he can think of and tries to slam the back of his head into Trace's ribs. The angle isn't right and Trace manages to get him to the floor even while Die makes a sincere attempt to scratch his eyes out. Itchy's jabbing fingers into his ribs and sides and stomach hard enough to bruise and too quickly and randomly for Die to curl away from. Fin concentrates singlemindedly on trying to get the pants off his kicking legs until Itchy proclaims him useless and takes his place, freeing Fin to kneel by Die's side as Itchy jerks Die's pants off between kicks and sends his screaming to a higher pitch. 

Fin grins kindly at Die with all his teeth and pats his face with a bloodied hand. "Lucky for you I'm not giving tit for tat, friend." Die tries to bite him again and Fin jerks his hand back. Trace sniggers. Fin punches him in the shoulder and Trace takes a hand off Die to retaliate, and Die gets a foot in Itchy's face and nearly gets away before Fin lunges at him and Trace gets an arm around his neck.

"Quit flirting, jackoffs!" Itchy yells, grabbing for one of Die's ankles with one hand while holding his swelling eye with the other. Trace gives him a slow stare and flips him off with his free hand while Fin laughs and says something about how Itchy's just jealous and Die chokes out strangled noises of rage.

"I'm gonna get some rope," Fin says, and stands up to head for the door with a glance around the room.

"If we tie him up we won't be able to get his clothes off, cleverdick!" Itchy yells after him.

"So I'll get scissors or something!" comes the call back, and then Fin's out of the room and Itchy makes an obscene gesture. "What a prick." He blurs over to Die's side and smacks the top of his thigh. "Come on, fucker, you should be appreciating the attention. It's the only kind you're ever gonna get."

Die's still squirming to get away in Trace's arms, but his vision is going black and he can't respond or try to kick Itchy again. Itchy looks down at his face and the tears involuntarily condensing at the corners of his eyes and waves a hand in front of him. "You're gonna kill him, dude."

"I'm not gonna kill him," Trace grouses, adjusting his grip slightly. It's not enough for Die to really breathe and his feet scrabble helplessly at the floor.

"Yes you are, you're gonna kill him and then we're gonna have a bony voodoo corpse on our hands and Crowbar's gonna give us neverending shit, like, for the rest of our lives."

"Shut the fuck up, I'm not gonna kill him."

"What the fuck is this?"

It's Crowbar's voice. Trace drops Die like he's on fire and backs away. Itchy manages "Ohhhhh shit, fuck the police," before changing his mind and flashing out past Crowbar before Crowbar can turn around. Die's head thuds on the floor and he pulls in half a wheezing breath before he loses it coughing. There's a yelp from Trace followed by Crowbar viciously telling him off, with more yelping indicating that Trace tried to get away before he was finished.

Die's still swallowing and coughing dizzily on the floor when Crowbar comes back in. He tries to help him up but Die pushes his hand away blindly, then rolls over and struggles to get to his knees, fending off Crowbar's attempts at assistance until he gives up and lets Die try to do it himself. Die stays on his hands and knees with Crowbar hovering over him, keeping his face turned away as he pantingly swallows saliva and snot and tries not to cry. He doesn't want Crowbar to see him crying, or to see that his face is already streaked with angry tears. He doesn't want him to see him like this at all. 

"Your clothes are right over there," Crowbar says awkwardly, breaking a silence filled only with the ticking of the clocks and Die's heaving breaths. Die tries to ignore him but he continues talking. "Lucky I ran across you before they could hide them or whatever else they were planning on thinking of. You okay?"

"Leave me alone," Die says thickly. He immediately hates how he sounds as it comes out, whiny and despicable and impotent. "Leave - just leave me alone. I hate you." His voice cracks on "hate" and he feels a flash of understanding for everyone who's ever tried to beat him up. He'd want to beat himself up, too.

Crowbar wavers indecisively for a moment, almost putting a hand on Die's shoulder before deciding against it and moving away. "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help," he says before leaving Die alone in the room with nothing but the ticking of the tesselated clocks.

His hat has rolled under a side table, his pants and coat and shoes strewn about randomly after being chucked across the room. He cries a little more as he crawls around collecting them, hiccupping occasionally and gulping tears and phlegm, and hates himself for doing so and everyone else alive for existing.

His doll is on top of a grandfather clock when he finally finds it, trapped behind the fretworked crown and completely unreachable. Die stares up at it hopelessly for a while with his throat tightening, imagining Itchy dead, Fin dead, everyone he knows dead and torn apart and drenched in blood like the aftermath of a bad horror movie, ribs and entrails smashed and jutting up from the unrecognisable remains of corpses crushed and wrenched apart like someone took a treaded boot and smeared them across the floor like a cockroach, before he squeezes his eyes shut and swallows a few times and goes to find something to stand on so he can clamber up the clock to get his doll.

* * *

He can't stay in the timeline where all three of them are dead, as the gallery continues to collapse in a storm of dust and yard-long splinters of wood from the cracking ceiling. He goes back to the one for Itchy and Trace, instead, and stares with dissatisfaction at the single body present. Blood seeps around his shoes and congeals between the stitches in the leather. He picks at it.

* * *

When he returns, some time later, Itchy and Fin are playing Alternian Rat Screw together at the dining room table. Die can't disguise the clap of displaced air from his appearance, and both of them look up in surprise at the sound, though Itchy immediately reaches for the cards between them and is arrested by an invisible grip. The bruise over Itchy's eye is faded to a jaundiced yellow, and Fin's hands are red from being slapped harder than necessary. Both are moving a little gingerly. Die licks his lips, tasting blood and remembering what they looked like shredded by bullets, stiffening slowly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gradually continuing to upload my older work. This piece and those to follow were originally written in 2013 and 2014.
> 
> It doesn't get much better from here.
> 
> (I'm not working on these fics anymore, but I'm always happy to hear what I've done well! If there ends up being enough interest, I might eventually finish and post some of my still-incomplete Intermission work as well.)


	2. The one where you can't technically prove everyone in the Felt doesn't have a vagina

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See chapter endnote for warnings.

Die is folded up against the wall opposite the door to his room when Crowbar comes out his own door shortly after dawn, checking his cuffs to make sure they're settled properly. He looks up to find Die staring at the door in front of him with the kind of stark, blank horror usually reserved for when he talks about dreams or dead timelines. His pants and the slivers of shirt visible at his wrists and collar are streaked with dried blood.

Crowbar stares at him for a second, then grabs the hand lying loosely by Die's ankle. He pushes up the sleeve and turns Die's hand over; written in black marker on the inside of his wrist, where Crowbar marked his timeline of origin to help them both keep track, are the words "NO ONE". There are no other marks above the bandage a few inches farther down his arm.

"Die." When Die doesn't answer, Crowbar lets his hand drop and shakes his shoulder. Die shudders and blinks, then looks at him, clearly watching the door to his room out of the corner of his eye. "Did you go anywhere last night?"

Die starts to squeeze his eyes shut before forcing them open again and glancing worriedly back toward his door. He hesitates before shaking his head.

"I—" The word is almost inaudible, and he stops and tries again. "I woke up like this, I — I was covered in blood, so I got rid of the sheets but when I woke up again it was soaked into the mm-mattress and it was all over my _clothes_ —"

He brings up his hand to bite it but stops himself halfway, watching the door fixedly and hyperventilating instead.

Crowbar gives the door an odd look and gets up to open it. Behind him, Die tries to scrabble farther backwards into the wall.

The room inside is dim, lit only by the bathroom light, and filled with a metallic smell. Crowbar switches on the light and follows the faint smears of blood on the floor around to the other side of the bed, where a crumpled ball of bedding sits against the wall. Crowbar pulls it apart to find the sheets and blanket as bloodstained as Die's clothes. He glances to the side to get an eyeful of the puddle of blood soaked right into the center of the mattress, at which point he smacks his cleaner hand against his forehead because somehow when he bludgeoned the rest of the Felt into getting Die to eat regularly and sleep in his own bed at night, not a single one of them considered the fact that he might finally become healthy enough to get his damn period.

Crowbar bundles the soiled bedding up in Die's laundry bag and goes to wash his hands, then heads back out into the hall. "Die, it's okay," he says, feeling distinctly awkward because he's never actually had to explain this to somebody before, everyone else already knew what the deal was and was used to it by the time he met them. "Nothing's wrong, you're just bleeding—" at which point he hastily corrects himself as Die's eyes widen, "it's just your period, it's biological, it happens every lunar cycle, you didn't get injured and it's not supernatural. You've heard the other guys mention it, right? Nothing weird about it, you've got nothing to worry about."

Die nods, swallowing hard and trying to hold back panic. Crowbar takes a chance and gets a hand under his elbow to pull him to his feet. "Listen, let's get you cleaned off and in a fresh set of clothes, and then we'll change your bedding and get you some pads." He keeps his voice even and in control as he leads Die to his room. "You can use my shower," since sending him back to his own would probably set off the breakdown that he's holding back. Crowbar uses the pill, himself, since worrying about bleeding into his pants when he's in the middle of fighting someone's a good way to get injuries that'd be embarrassing to have to justify later, but a decade of living in a house with fourteen people whose cycles synced up after the first six months has taught him to keep a drawer stocked with pads and related paraphernalia.

Crowbar gets Die's clothes off — and much as he'd rather not look, he manages to notice that Die has finally developed something almost a little like an actual subcutaneous fat layer — and shuts him in the bathroom before tossing his clothes out in the hall to deal with later, leaning back against the door, pressing his fingers into his forehead, and muttering "god _damn_ " under his breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Warnings:**  
>  Menstruation and disordered eating.
> 
> I can't actually imagine a reason that a non-mammalian alien species would menstruate, but this is the kind of fic you get when it's 2:00 AM and someone says, "Hey, so _what if—"_
> 
> I also can't imagine Crowbar being particularly squeamish about blood, regardless of where it comes from.


	3. All is weightless, all is bright

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A small reprieve.

Matchsticks finds him in one of the disused rooms at the back of the first basement level. Die is crouched over a piece of wood that looks like shrapnel from one of the destroyed chairs piled up against the wall that he passed on the way here, placing tiny humanoid figures along the top of it with painstaking care. Matchsticks purposely scuffs his shoe on the carpet mid-step, and Die jumps like he's been electrocuted, spilling the figures everywhere.

Matchsticks wraps a hand around Die's before he can use the pin Matchsticks is certain he's already holding. A prick in the padding of his middle finger confirms his hunch. Die begins to make an effort to pull his hand away, then presses his lips together and looks away sulkily.

Now that he's closer, Matchsticks can see that the figures are made of wax-smeared cloth held in shape with black thread, with scraps of coloured fabric sewn to each of them by a single knotted stitch. He crouches and picks one up, picking at the knot for a moment, then glances back at Die. "What were you going to do with these?"

Die mutters something inaudible. Matchsticks cocks his head slightly and waits for him to speak up. This time, after a while, Matchsticks manages to make out the words "burn them".

"Not here." He takes the pin from Die's hand and slots it back into the brim of his hat with the rest, then starts gathering the scattered figures. "You'll bring half the place down. We have a fireplace for a reason."

Die watches him, holding the knuckle of his index finger between his teeth, then darts forward and clutches the piece of wood to his chest as Matchsticks stands. Matchsticks heads out through the succession of rooms toward the stairs leading upward, knowing Die will follow him. The sound of half-voiced muttering trails a few yards behind him all the way through the basement and the ground floor to the fireplace in the cavernous living room.

The curved shard of chair is just long enough to sit in the grate without falling to the stone floor beneath. Matchsticks takes it from Die's arms and balances it on the grille, then pauses. "I don't know where the rest of these go."

Die immediately pushes in front of him and flips the piece of wood a hundred and eighty degrees before snatching the figures out of the shelf Matchsticks has made of his forearm and chest without looking at him. "You're doing it wrong." 

Matchsticks stands back while Die nudges them into position with obsessive-compulsive precision, talking to himself in incomprehensible but often somehow disturbing sentence fragments the entire time. The figures can't stand on their own, so they lie on the wood at odd angles as Die adjusts them fractionally with unsteady hands.

Eventually he sits back on his heels, though his expression is still twisted with dissatisfaction. Matchsticks kneels and scrapes a quarter-handful of tinder from the tin in his pocket into a pile beneath it, looking at Die once to be sure that this is correct. Die just keeps staring at the tableau with the same unchanging expression, so Matchsticks lights it and slowly coaxes it into a flame large enough to start eating at the wood.

They sit in silence for a while. Matchsticks examines Die out of the corner of his eye, watching the way the shadows change on his face in the firelight. His eye catches on a V of dark green knit at the base of his neck. "Did you take your coat off for that?"

Die immediately pulls his head into the flared collar of his coat so that there's barely an inch of space between it and the brim of his hat and mutters something indistinct that Matchsticks takes as affirmation, followed by, "So what if I did?"

Matchsticks has been wearing his own Midwinter sweater since this morning, a monstrosity of red wool with X's of the same colour cross-stitched into the white borders. "It looks nice."

Die ducks his head even deeper into his collar, crinkling it against his hat. He doesn't move even when, much later, their hands touch as the effigy log sublimates into a bridge of ashes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure this goes far enough to merit a ship tag, but we should all feel proud of Die for not immediately pushing someone away for the sin of visibly tolerating him.


	4. Mobs and Robbers

They have Die on watch at the back door. That was probably the best place the Felt could figure out to put him - no one in the Midnight Crew's ever actually seen him use a weapon aside from the doll, in fact has seldom seen him at all except popping out of the timeline whenever things get too hot. A coward. That's useful for your purposes.

Your first swing of the cuestick takes the doll out of the green suit's hand and flying ten feet across the alley. Die lunges for it with unexpected speed and your second swing doubles him over around a set of broken ribs. Your third swing puts him on the ground.

You'd sure hate to be lying on the floor of the alley like that. Who knows what kind of filth he's getting his blood all over down there.

You fish out the 10-4 cards and tell Slick that they had Die on the back door. He's down, you tell him. Dead? Slick asks. Not yet, you answer.

See if you can get him to talk, Slick says.

You nod acknowledgement and pocket the radio. Die's been trying to crawl over to the doll while you were talking. You discourage this by kicking him in the head.

Once his eyes have started focusing again you ask him who they've got inside the warehouse. His eyes keep going toward the doll past your right shoulder. You get his attention by burying the tip of the cuestick into the wall beside his head. He shivers away and says nothing.

That's fine. You know how to handle this. You step over to the doll and slip it into your deck. He can have it back and fuck out of this timeline once he's talked, you start to tell him before he's on top of you and clawing at your face and throat with jagged fingernails that have apparently never been cut within your lifetime. A drubbing with the butt of your cuestick gets you about half a second before he's on you again and going for your deck.

Somehow in the daze of pain and surprise you manage to get your hands on his wrists. They're frighteningly bony and he's twisting wildly in your grip, trying to reach your face again. You're pretty sure he's completely insane and you aren't going to be able to keep him away from you much longer, so you do the first thing you can think of and get your foot up against his elbow to break his arm.

That actually manages to shock him for a second, and that's all you need to get him in the neck with your cuestick as he starts to fall back. He crumples.

After a minute standing there to get your breath back, you radio Slick and tell him that Die didn't feel like talking. Fine, says Slick. Boxcars'll reconnoiter. A crash comes from the north side of the warehouse that says Boxcars has driven the van through the outer wall.

You leave Die splayed across the ground like a broken marionette and saunter in through the back door to join up with the rest of the crew. There's the unfamiliar weight of the doll in your deck. He'll have to find you to get it back, if he ends up living. You'll handle that, too.


End file.
